Family of four, two working parents, tiny home, urban homestead

There was this moment, about a month and a half ago, when I thought everything was finally going to fall together. We were going to actually get money back on our taxes instead of paying, so we could finally move forward on remodeling the attic into a loft bedroom for us, and move off of…

Projects seem to get prioritized around here based on necessity–probably the same for most of you. We have a long list of projects we want to do in our new house, and making a worm bin was not originally close to the top of the list. However, we ran into a problem with the compost…..mainly…

Yesterday, for International Women’s Day, this is what I did to celebrate: The day started when my son woke up with Pink Eye. His eyes goobered shut, and highly contagious. In that moment of looking at his pathetic little sick angel face, I was simultaneously cognizant of and weighed down by two things: 1. Nursing…

Deciding to actually buy a very small house for our family of four was the first half of the marathon….actually downsizing and relocating was the second half. In my last post I described the long process of deciding what kind of home purchase best supported our goals and values as a family, and than deciding…

Yup, that Pinterest board we all have turned into real life for us. We just purchased our first home; it’s 684 sf. And we have two children. I think that everyone I have told this to has raised their eyebrows a bit, looked confused, and asked an awkward question about how we like it or…

So…I started writing this post in November. Taking advantage of the snowy Portland weather to finish it up…. (I sit drinking my first glass of hard cider that I brewed myself while eating Roasted Gorgonzola crackers from Trader Joe’s….it’s the right thing to be doing). This fall I slid into a cider obsession. It all…

This blog post might be more aptly named “Everything-I-took-photos-of-since-May-but-never-blogged-about-because-the-summer-was-too-crazy-and-I-wanted-to-look-at-the-sky-rather-than-a-computer-screen”. So here we are. End of August. Rain outside for the first time in months. Oak leaves all over the lawn. And I am coming to terms with the summer ending. I am pulling things out of my summer garden and getting fall/winter crops going (a…

I always have had a strong fascination with seeds and eggs. These beautiful inanimate objects that create new life. When I was a kid, I loved to climb the apple trees at my Oma’s house and look in the Robin nests. All those beautiful, small, perfect orbs that little baby Robins would come out of. …

This is the way Oma taught me to make Easter eggs. They are made using vegetables found in your refrigerator and garden weeds. No chemicals. And so simple that my nearly two year old helped me with these. There is less than a week left until Easter. I thought I’d pass this along just in…

Have you started planting yet? This was my seed table about two weeks ago. The seeds have been popping up throughout this week. I don’t have artificial light heat in my greenhouse, so seeds are a little slower to come up. But my theory is natural selection: I am saving my own seeds, so am…

If you eat meat, hopefully you are aware that it is not created in a factory and it does not originate in Styrofoam packages. It was once a living, breathing, animated life walking this earth. So if you are willing to eat it, you must be OK with its life ending for that purpose. But…

Today it smelled like spring outside here in Oregon. And when I went into my little greenhouse, I saw that my experiment was working, and I had hope for this year’s crops. Last summer some neighbors were replacing all of their windows, and gave us the old ones for making a greenhouse. Neither my husband…